* Emergent technologies diffuse unevenly.As Jorge Reina Schement points
out in "Of Gaps by Which Democracy We Measure," "all new technologies diffuse
unevenly" (p. 305). Innovation diffusion always starts with early adopters
who tend to be better off and can afford the new technology. Eventually,
more wide-spread interest creates more volume and lower prices. This
diffusion rate follows an "S" curve if plotted over time. Examples
of this diffusion pattern from other media include electricity, the automobile,
the telephone, radio, and television—all of which started on a small scale
and with a high price. Notably, the
adoption rate varied for each of these—the slowest rate for the telephone
and the fastest for television. These varied rates reflect the difference
between information goods (i.e., television sets, VCRs, etc.) versus information
services (i.e., telephone): the former diffuse much more quickly than the
latter because the latter requires infrastructure as well as ongoing usage
costs.
In fact, the call for "universal
service" dates back to 1907, with the need to interconnect the nation's
fragmented telephone networks. The Communications Act of 1934 created the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to insure access to that infrastructure.
Still even with "government tinkering," in Compaine's phrase, only 50% in 1946 had telephones.
Even today, not everyone has a telephone either
because not everyone wants a telephone or because not everyone can afford
its usage costs, such as intrastate long-distance calls. Further, it is
always ill-advised to support a technology too early in its development.
Wireless, rather than wired, connectivity may be the wave of the future
Internet, so the $6 billion that have already been spent to date on wiring
the schools, for example, may have been wasted.